Concrete roof tile manufacturing

[Kenton H. Shepard, CMI]

I shot some video at the Westile plant for the Roof Defect Recognition course. I thought I'd take a few stills and post them as a preview of some of the course content.

1. The mixing vat (looks like a blue space capsule). Just beyond the vat you can see just the bottom of the huge sand hopper.
2. Conveyer transfers mud from the vat and drops it onto forms
3. Mud gets trimmed and troweled automatically (cutter in yellow cage) and another belt takes it to racks at the far end. The full racks are loaded automatically onto a cart which takes them down a tunnel to one of a series of kiln rooms. The racks at the end of the conveyer on the left are full of un-fired tiles. Racks on the right are loaded with tiles that been fired. Each rack weighs about 4 tons.
4. Conveyer on the right brings fired tiles back from the racks.
5. Tiles on conveyer to the left have been separated from the forms and are headed for the packaging machine at the far end of the space. It's the big series of blue frames.

You can see the pallets stacked and waiting and a few on the wide coveyer to the left which are already loaded, wrapped and waiting for the forklift to take them to the yard.
The middle conveyer carries forms which loop back for oiling and more mud.
See the white tanks on the right? The big one is form oil, the smaller ones are additives like sealer.

I've also visited a truss manufacturing plant (that segment's already cut and looks good) and we'll have video from a coil-coating plant where they coat coils of steel for metal roofing.

[Brian E. Kelly]

Wow, very cool Kenton. Thank you.